


Sleeping Wings

by cookinguptales



Category: Sleep No More - Punchdrunk
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 04:44:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13139343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookinguptales/pseuds/cookinguptales
Summary: If there's one thing Bargarran knows, it's death. But never, in all his days, has he seen it reversed like this.





	Sleeping Wings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DeCarabas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/gifts).



Leather and blood, steel and bone. Bargarran's workplace was dimly lit and austere, but it was his. He'd grown there and lived there, placed the key in that creaky old lock more times than he could count. He knew it. He knew the feathers and the gore and the feeling of viscera beneath quick fingers. He was mired in death and inured to it; above all else, he knew its solemn beat.

That was how he knew that something had changed.

It was a shiver beneath long-dead flesh. Skin that warmed even as it was sewn shut. A shudder of bones, a tingle of electricity, fur ruffling up in wind that he could not feel. Once, very late at night, even as the evening bells were ringing, he saw a crow's mount blink one dead eye.

He'd rubbed his eyes as he closed up shop. It was just exhaustion. It had to be. Anything else would be madness.

But he heard thumps as he walked home down snow-lined streets, a knocking coming from locked doors, and his stomach knotted as he realized that they were coming from within. The air was spiced and heavy, like strong mulled wine, and he felt intoxicated with it. With something very much like magic.

He heard crows' wings on the wind and tried to tell himself that they had not flown out the door behind him.

Bargarran believed in magic. He believed that magic, like death, should be contained. Death could be held in quick hands, as long as they were connected to a stone heart, and in every sewn wing, every fitted skin, Bargarran held death tight. Down the street, though, in a dusty old mortuary, he had his doubts.

The tailor, the mortician, that dark-eyed witch -- his heart, Bargarran believed, was anything but stone. He was not holding death down, quieting it even in the throes of mercy. He was breathing fresh life into it, fey, cursed life, and with it came the darkness. The magic. The voices whispering in the snow.

Death was not being held in Paisley, and so it ran free.

Bargarran nodded to a man in the street, a stranger, and tried to rub the shiver from the back of his spine. He'd seen a man so like him in the window of the mortuary only two weeks before. That day, he'd been lying down.

He told himself the dead were not walking. That the old laws were still in effect. That ghosts were not welcome in their quiet little town. But he saw footsteps marked with blood that disappeared with the twilight, and a stag he remembered mounting stared at him, stark against the dawn.

He paced the worn floors of his shop, feeling eyes follow him as he moved, and he tried to ignore the uncanniness of a crypt slowly, haltingly, beginning to breathe. There had to be something he could do, something to chain the magic and its foul effects. Chain the charms and spells and bird cries in the night.

There had been witches in Paisley before, and they had been stamped out with brutal efficiency. Now Bargarran suspected that they had returned, and that the God-fearing folks of the village would need to reenact their old... efficiencies. It was a job he had no love for, no yearning or spark, but it was one that he would carry out if need be. Gallow Green would see blood yet if it meant that death could be put back in its casket.

Who else could do it? Who else had the will and the skills and the cold stone heart? Bargarran was mired in death, after all. And, he thought to himself as he hurried past dark mortuary doors, only one of them needed to be in this town. One was necessity, dark as it was. Two was... Well, two was suspicious. Two invited the devil's hand.

In dreams, he felt it wrap its icy fingers around his neck, and in the morning, he half-fancied that there were burns laid flat against his skin. But they were gone again as soon as he blinked, wiped out against the glint of sun on snow. Magic. Magic and devilry.

As the winter deepened and the days grew short, time seemed to warp at the corners of his eyes. Dead and back again, the leaves and the birds and dark, dark strangers wandering the streets of a town he held dear. Day was night and night was day and he felt dizzy with it, dizzy, as if the two were becoming one and the same. As if time were caught in the revolution of the earth and the days came again and again and again as the dead crept from their graves.

He stood there one night, more strangers than he'd ever seen before lining the streets of Paisley proper, and faraway on the wind, he could hear an inhuman shriek. A bird and a woman, neither and both, as entwined as the sun and moon had become on these dark, dark days, and at the other end of the street, a tall man listened.

The mortician, all mended clothes and lanky corners, stood listening to the cries on the wind, and Bargarran realized with a start that he always had been. Listening. Listening. How long had the shadows been there before he'd noticed them in his midst? How long had the skeletons in his shop chittered and gossiped amongst themselves? How long had J. Fulton known that the devil walked the streets of Paisley, peering in storefronts and beckoning to the dead within. And, most importantly of all... had he invited his attentions?

He moved before he thought. Or maybe it had come after days of thinking, years, an eternity of days and nights and rebirths that never, ever stopped. He hit him. He felt flesh beneath his fists, and it was cold. He stared into eyes that flared with fury even as they were limned with death.

If he cut Fulton, would he bleed? Would the blood pool beneath his skin, sluggish, like that of a stag dragged for mounting? Would his veins, Christ, would they sprout with fresh blooms and wormwood, magic all the way down? What bound this man, if not magic or death? Could any of it be bound anymore, and was it ever?

Bargarran didn't know. He didn't know. He staggered back, still feeling the chill of turned flesh beneath his knuckles, and he shut himself away inside the shop. And as the night turned to day to night to the everlasting twilight, as the screams became laughter and the laughter choked with tears, he felt eyes on him.

He turned, slowly, as the crows' wings took flight.


End file.
